The Life Intended (8 page)

“Sleepwalking isn’t that uncommon,” the doctor adds with a shrug. “I’m certain that’s what happened.”

“But how could everything be so vivid?” I ask. “How do I know things that I couldn’t possibly know in reality?”

He shrugs again. “The subconscious works in strange ways, Ms. Waithman. Trying to figure it out will only make it feel more confusing. My suggestion would be to get some rest and forget about this. Dreams can be very powerful, but it’s important to remember that none of it is real.”

Still, over the next few days, I can’t stop thinking about Hannah. My inability to sign back to her was what yanked me out of the second dream, and I find myself obsessing about how I’ll communicate with her if I wake up in the alternate life again. Would knowing sign language myself help me to stay longer next time, to fit into the dream’s landscape a little better? The thing is, the cut on my finger, still throbbing, doesn’t feel like my subconscious speaking at all.

O
n Monday morning, after a weekend of going to bed early and trying in vain to dream, I arrive at the office twenty minutes before my first appointment and spend a few minutes googling American Sign Language. I quickly learn how to say
mom, dad, love, daughter,
and
here.
Then, before I have a chance to question what I’m doing, I click on a pop-up ad for an eighteen-week GothamLearn sign language class being offered within walking distance of my office.

The class began last week, but when I e-mail to ask about enrolling, I get a quick return message from GothamLearn’s online director telling me that it’s not too late to join if I’d like; I should just arrive a few minutes before seven on Wednesday night with a check for my tuition to hand to the instructor, a man named Andrew Henson.

I’ll be there,
I reply before I can talk myself out of it, and as I hit Send, I’m buoyant. I also feel idiotic for doing this; I know intellectually that Hannah can’t be real. But at least taking a class will be more constructive than day drinking and trying to force myself to sleep.

Dina buzzes to tell me my first client of the day has arrived, and I shut my laptop quickly, as if I’m looking at porn rather than hand signs.

Leo Goldstein strides in a moment later, the circles under his eyes dark and his jaw set belligerently. “Okay, I’m here,” he announces, throwing himself onto the couch opposite my desk. “What do you want me to do?”

Leo looks paler today,
I think as I move to sit beside him in an armchair, and when I look closely, I see the shadow of a bruise on his right forearm, where he has pushed his sleeve up. The skin around the purpling stain is a soft yellowish green.

“Leo, what happened to your arm?” I ask.

He looks down and frowns, tugging his sleeve over the mark. “Nothing,” he says, quickly amending, “Tripped on the basketball court.”

Leo’s mom started bringing him to me about four months ago, when he began having behavior issues at Tompkins Square Middle School, where he’s currently in seventh grade. He made it clear from the beginning that he hated being here—and hated me as a result—but older kids often resist therapy at the beginning. I knew if I waited him out, chances were he’d come around. And he did.

Little by little, even though he always complained that singing was for babies and banging drumsticks against bongos was pointless, he had come out of his shell. Now, we’re in a routine that seems to work: he huffs into my office, sulks for a few minutes, tells me nothing is wrong, and then brightens when I pull out my double xylophone.

Most weeks, we play Beatles songs, which Leo calls “retro-cool.” The Beatles theme to our sessions was his idea; I like to let my clients lead whenever possible, because the more comfortable they are with the music we’re playing, the easier it is for them to open up.

Getting Leo hooked on playing the music rather than just listening to it was an important step, because it has allowed us to
develop a common language. Sometimes it’s hard, for example, to say you’re angry. But pounding an instrument gets the point across without words. Kind of like sign language, I think: meaning without articulation. You just have to know how to communicate.

“Anyway, I learned ‘You Can’t Do That’ this week,” Leo tells me, his eyes sliding away from mine. “I’ve been practicing on my iPad keyboard app.”

“From the
Hard Day’s Night
album.”

“Yeah. From 1964,” he says with the authority of someone who was around then. “Want to hear it?”

“Sure.” I shuffle a few papers then grab the xylophone mallets, purposely taking a long time. “So about that bruise: You must have fallen pretty hard, I guess.”

“No big deal.” His voice is gruff, his eyes shifty. “It didn’t even hurt anyways.”

“Was Tyler there?”

He hesitates, and from the way his eyes flick to mine and then dance quickly away again, I know I’ve hit upon the truth. “Maybe,” he mumbles. “Don’t remember.”

“Did you hit him back?” I ask softly.

He looks at his hands for a minute. “No,” he says finally. “All his friends were there too.”

“Bunch of jerks,” I mutter under my breath. Leo is tall and slender, with the kind of shape he’ll grow into when he’s older. But for now, he’s a stick figure, and Tyler Mason, who’s a year older and forty pounds heavier than Leo, teases him mercilessly about the way he looks. His friends join in too, probably relieved not to be on the receiving end of bullying themselves.

Tyler’s also the kind of kid who can talk himself out of situations, so when Leo began fighting back, it was Leo who was labeled the problem kid. Somehow, the teachers never saw Tyler
throwing the first punch or hissing under his breath that Leo was a beanpole. As a result, Tyler’s halo was intact, and Leo was becoming a frequent visitor to the principal’s office.

His mother had brought him to me on his school guidance counselor’s recommendation; she couldn’t understand why her son had started acting inexplicably violent. It took me three sessions to grasp that Leo wasn’t the aggressor. He was being bullied and didn’t want to admit it. By the time I sat his parents down and explained the situation, they’d already decided to keep sending him to me on a weekly basis, because they were seeing marked improvements in his schoolwork and behavior at home.

I hand Leo the mallets, and he grins at me—the first real smile since he’s gotten here—and begins playing the Beatles’ song. He impresses me, as he always does, with his skill. I join in on my guitar after a moment.

“So what does the song mean to you?” I ask after we’ve finished. It’s one of my ground rules with Leo; he has to tell me why he’s picked a song. It’s another way to open up discussion between us.

“I don’t know,” he replies, looking down.

I’m silent, waiting patiently for him to go on.

“I guess when the singer says ‘leave you flat,’ I was thinking about when Tyler said he’d flatten my face,” Leo finally mumbles. “And then the singer says people would laugh at him, and sometimes that happens to me too.”

I nod, pleased that we’re at a point where he can say things like this to me. Of course the Beatles song is about a guy telling his girl that he’ll break up with her if he catches her talking to a particular guy again, but Leo has gotten something entirely different out of the lyrics. That’s one of my favorite things about music—that the same words, the same notes, can mean completely different things to different people.

“Did you talk to your teacher about Tyler?” I ask.

He shakes his head. “Tattletales get beat up worse.”

“How about your mom and dad?”

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he bangs his mallet on the xylophone for a minute before asking abruptly, “You got any kids?” I see him looking at the two framed photos on my desk of me with Dan. “Who’s that guy anyways?” he asks before waiting for an answer.

“That’s my boyfriend.” I pause and correct myself. “Well, actually, my fiancé. And no, I don’t have any kids.”

“Why not?” He’s twirling one of his xylophone mallets now. “You seem pretty old. Like older than my mom.”

It’s common for kids to try to turn the therapy sessions around on me, but the purpose of these visits isn’t so that we can bond and become friends; it’s so that they can find out more about themselves. I try to walk a fine line between answering their questions honestly—because I think adults should always take children’s questions seriously, and I want Leo to feel like I respect his feelings—and deflecting questions that are too personal.

I shrug. “Why do you ask about kids?”

“I just want to know.”

Again, I stay quiet, waiting for him to go on. Silence can often be as effective as sound when you use it correctly. After a moment, he returns to playing the melody of the Beatles song, almost absently. “I bet you wouldn’t let someone beat up on your kid,” he says in a small voice when he stops playing again. “I bet you’d care enough.”

So that’s what his questions are about. “Leo, what’s happening at school isn’t because your parents don’t care about you.”

His jaw tightens. “My dad keeps saying I got to just stick up for myself and hit Tyler back. But Tyler would beat the crud out
of me. Or his friends would. You think my dad wants me to get beat up?”

“Absolutely not, Leo. He’s just telling you that sometimes, bullies won’t push around someone who stands up to them.”

“Yeah, well, I bet you wouldn’t let your kid go and get creamed, if you had a kid,” he grumbles. “I bet you’d fix things and help your kid to be happy.”

I
’m at the stove making shrimp scampi that night when Dan gets home.

“Dinner smells great,” he says, coming up behind me and nuzzling my neck. “I love it when you cook, babe.”

“Why don’t you open a bottle of wine? And would you mind setting the table?”

“Sure.” He opens a bottle of sauvignon blanc, pours us each a glass, then heads into the bedroom to change out of his suit and tie. A minute later, I can hear the shower running, which annoys me a little. He knows the meal is almost ready.
Patrick never would have done that,
I think, but I catch myself and banish the thought. It’s not fair to compare my former husband with my future one.

But as I set the table myself, top off my wine, and pour us each a glass of water, I can’t help but think how different this feels. Dan’s a great guy, just like Patrick was, but in a way, the similarities end there. For the first time, I find myself wondering if what attracted me most to Dan is simply that he was so different from Patrick. He’s perfect and glossy, a storybook prince, while Patrick was rough and warm and endearingly imperfect.

As I pile pasta onto two plates and add shrimp and buttery garlic sauce, I feel a pang of sadness. Patrick and I used to cook for each other all the time, and I loved that we had
a sort of intimacy in the kitchen. We were a team; if he was cooking, I was chopping vegetables or washing dishes. If I was cooking, he was pouring wine or setting the table. We had an easy sort of we’re-in-this-together camaraderie that’s just not there with Dan.

Patrick and I used to communicate in our own sort of shorthand too. I could say a single word, and he’d almost always know exactly what I meant. He’d say,
Lynn,
for example, and I’d know he’d had a tough day at the office with his boss and that he needed a few minutes alone to unwind. I’d say,
Five,
and he’d know dinner would be ready in five minutes and he should start pouring our water. He’d breathe
Katielee
in a low voice, and we’d always look at each other for a moment before dropping everything we were doing and heading for the bedroom. There were a thousand words between us that spoke volumes, but I can’t think of a single one that Dan and I share.

I don’t even know the stories of Dan’s childhood, the things that shaped him. I don’t know what he wanted to be when he grew up, or what his school social life was like, or what books and movies he liked as a boy. Yet I can still name Patrick’s elementary-school best friend, tell the tale of the day he got into a fight in seventh grade defending a girl he had a crush on, and recite a list of his career aspirations in chronological order from garbage man to astronaut to chef to pilot to financial analyst.

Does the fact that I don’t know those kinds of things about Dan mean that something’s broken between us? Or is it just a logical result of beginning to date when we were older, at a time in our lives when childhood felt further away?

“What were you like in high school?” I ask almost desperately as Dan sits down at the table a few minutes later. He’s wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt, and he smells like soap.

He takes a bite of pasta and a sip of wine before answering. “I don’t know. The same as I am now, I guess. Why?”

“I just feel like I don’t know about your past as much as I maybe should.”

“Okay,” he says, giving me a strange look.

“So tell me about it,” I say. Maybe I can use the shreds of information he gives me to patch the holes I’m beginning to see between us. “Your past, I mean.”

“You’re acting weird.”

“Just humor me.”

He shrugs. “All right. School was never really an issue. I always did well. I played soccer in junior high and football in high school, so I was always pretty popular. Never really had any problems with the other kids. I was actually the prom king. Haven’t I told you that before?”

I ignore the question, because in fact I’ve heard it at least a dozen times. “But there had to have been a time when you struggled,” I protest. “A time when you were bullied, or when you were sad, or when you just had a bad few months.”

“Not that I can recall.” He looks at me more closely. “Why? Were you bullied?”

“No,” I say, suddenly desperate to share. “But I had rough patches in school. Fifth grade, for example. We’d just moved to a new school district, and all the kids in my class wore designer clothes and arrived in their parents’ expensive cars. I took the bus, and my favorite outfit was a Superman T-shirt and polka-dot skirt, which I wore all the time. I got made fun of a lot that year.” I smile, intending for the words to be funny, but he just looks confused.